486th played so far
Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1988
Developer: Peter Irvin/Jeremy Smith
Publisher: Superior Software/Audiogenic
When I hear of a videogame called Exile, my mind goes to the massive open world RPGs from Spiderweb Software. Today, that’s not actually true – Exile refers to an old adventure-ish game that I’ve only seen a weird psychedelic screenshot of. What we need to do? I’m still not sure.
Our Thoughts
That game did have action in it, with the adventuring elements of the ‘find switch’ puzzle solving mostly. You start in your space ship, flying down to a planet to get something that you need (MacGuffin style) to repair it. Mostly easy so far – although I believe I got stuck with switches not activating in the right places – but the controls already feel awkward and bouncy.
Soon after, you encounter enemies, and that’s where my annoyance really began. While you can shoot, it’s incredibly difficult to aim, not intuitive at all (at least with the controls we had available) and so we just died, and died, and died. With that, it became difficult to advance as the enemies really can swoop in. Having gotten past the first hatch (easily half an hour in), it gets worse, and the time it takes to do each step means that we barely explored anywhere. For a game that wants you to adventure, that’s a shame, as you never really get a chance to explore or learn, you just face what seem to be brick walls. And even if you get past one the first time, there’s no guarantee you will for the next.
Final Thoughts
It feels like this game still has a bit too much of the arcade attitude, having to punish players instead of encouraging exploration. It’s there, it’s inviting, but damn, it’s just a bit too unfriendly now to put up with. It makes me want to get to some more Metroid or Uncharted though.